Working At Home

2122012

I was reading in the paper yesterday that some schools throughout NSW are going to trial a scheme where parents are going to have the choice to refuse homework for their children.

Then…..

What?! Are they insane? (It’s either you or them – ed.) Think about it, television and social media is a big distraction for young people (well it might be for you – ed.) now as it is any way, and if we give them even more of an excuse to watch it, how hard will it be to try and convince them to do work in later years?

My mum is a teacher at the school down the road, and she tells me that the only homework that kindergarten gets is a reader that they have to take home, and the rest is pretty self explanatory; nothing overly hard there, but significant none the less because reading and writing is the most important skill to get you through life. Admittedly you don’t need both, the man down the road is good with words but told me he only ever picks up a pen when he needs to sign his name. But you never tell a young kid this.

This has happend to me before.

But even history homework would be important to help set you up in life. I remember once that I had to look up information on a leading Australian sports star and present the main points about them to the class. How would this be hard for kids to do these days? With all the internet sources that are available, it would be done in 10 minutes.

That’s another reason why it is important that kids are made to do homework; because it’ll teach them to pick up a book every now and then. While technology is good, it’s not the be all and end all when it comes to research. I think this is where I may have stumbled a bit through high school as I had the mentality that the internet could tell me anything I asked of it.

True

As my mum points out though, if the parent opts for their children to not have do homework, not only are they disadvantaging the kid, they are placing a bad image upon themselves as a parent. She said that to pull them out would just be a cop out on the parents behalf and that the teachers would pick up on this pretty quickly.

Name a job that doesn’t require a degree of what could be referred to as homework. Go on. Admittedly no one likes to take home their work with them, but in some professions, it’s inevitable. It might also be a good thing though if it’s like high school. By this I mean, in high school, most of the home work that I got for the likes of maths and health was to finish the work that I didn’t get completed in class. This might be motivation in the when you enter the work force; “Finish it by knock off and the rest of the day you can do what you like”.

Homework is a fact of life. There are people out there in the world who would love to go school, and here we are loathing it. That just doesn’t make sense.